The Bloomberg Effect

I've more or less been under the belief that a serious Bloomberg third-party candidacy kills the Democratic nominee in November. But this first glance at polling to measure the effect might warrant some rethinking of that.

The reason seems to be that, electorally, we're actually getting a bump of sorts. Ohio and New York look like good margins and offer two sides of the coin for good news - we remain competitive in a state we now have to win and Bloomberg doesn't hurt Hillary in New York. A veritable tie in Kentucky? Not bad. Good margins in Iowa, Missouri, and New Mexico are another ray of hope. I might have preferred seeing Virginia more in play, but the numbers already add up nicely for us.

Would the numbers change much if the nominees change? No telling. At the end of the day, I still maintain that any Democratic nominee is going to go through a ringer of public opinion testing that puts their eventual numbers where Hillary's are right now. Just my preference, but I'll stick with someone who's been through the ringer before ... and won.

The one open question from this is that with third party candidacies, the nature of the entire campaign is much more volatile. People get to know and see Bloomberg more (assuming he runs, of course). There will be sides of him that undecideds will like and dislike ... and that his current supporters like more and dislike more. Recall that, at various points, Ross Perot led or was a distant third. Bill Clinton was either roadkill or an eventual lock. Granted, there's no guarantee that Bloomberg will pull off the nutso performance that Perot did in 1992.

Then again, anything's possible. It's still early. Way early.